The stars have no proof / of life but smolder regardless, maggots / feasting on the sky’s vast corpse, and like them / you were science before you were fiction.

“I think what's important is to look at your own obsessions, whether it's a family tale that you remember and wonder about, like some missing great grandmother whom you’ve heard stories about, or maybe something happened in your town years ago, and you thought, well, that's a weird story.”

Members Only author Sameer Pandya talks with Yoojin Na about the ideal measure of novelistic time, India, layered moments in fiction, and the grace of tennis.

“It's a funny feeling that you get when you find out somebody set you on fire.”

Are Craigslist personal ads different in small towns?

“A prayer here for all distractible children, capable of flight.”

"I tell a friend there is so much to feel guilty about / then I think about how this is a woman's thought a woman's problem"

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

“A duck’s disappearance figures in history’s rising action only obliquely. A mass death that only enlivens a larger dramatic structure. It is setting; it is not scene.”